Pulling back the curtain on scholarly publishing: the journal of community practice experience

A little over two years ago this team started a three year term as the editors for the Journal of Community Practice (JCP). Our long-standing managing editor, Ana Santiago-SanRoman, has worked for the journal for over 20 years, and has witnessed the many shifts in the publishing industry overall and for the JCP specifically. However, the rest of our team was new to journal editing, though we did have decades of experience reviewing for journals and editing books. We learned so much in our first two years of this work and have come to realize that the publishing industry is in a time of crisis, with a reckoning needed. For this editorial, we want to pull back the curtain to share our observations of how the peer reviewed publishing process works and our recommendations for how we as scholars move forward given this time of transition to perhaps a new normal. We hope that by demystifying the process and providing a glimpse into the publishing industry we can give scholars insight into what is happening with their work when they submit it to JCP or similar peer reviewed journals, and we encourage everyone to consider how we can contribute to a new approach.

Who are we and what do editors do?

Our editorial team consists of 6 members: 4 editors (one of whom serves as the editor-in- chief), an archives editor, and a managing editor. Our organizational structure is lean and one of many among journals that operate largely dependent on volunteers, while some other larger journals having more resources to commit to staffing and more robust editor teams with associate editors. Our managing editor is a part time employee paid by the Association for Community Organization and Social Action (ACOSA), the journal’s organizational sponsor, to provide management and support for the journal. The rest of our team serve in these roles unpaid as service to the profession. All team members have social work educational backgrounds and successful academic careers. Two of us are emeritus faculty. Three are full time academics, with all three holding university administrative positions and two being prolific researchers. One also is on the board of one of our national social work associations. While this means that we are all highly published and capable to serve in our editorial roles, it also means that we all have limited capacity for completing the day-to-day tasks of the journal and staying abreast of the changing landscape of the publishing world.

Each year, our editorial team processes approximately 142 manuscripts and typically publishes 4 issues with approximately 26 articles in each volume. The managing editor and editor-in-chief conduct an initial review of all submitted manuscripts to determine alignment with the focus of the journal. Articles that focus on topics within the scope of the journal’s mission are assigned to a member of the editor team, who then works on identifying reviewers for the manuscript. Articles that do not align with the journal’s mission are processed as a desk rejection after the initial editor review. The editor who has been assigned the manuscript reviews it and starts searching for experts in the topic to invite to review. The editors continue sending review requests out to potential reviewers until two to three agree to review the manuscript. We have seen situations where more than 20 potential reviewers were contacted without one agreeing to review. Once a reviewer accepts an invitation to review, they have six weeks to complete the review, but extensions are provided if requested, and they are often requested. After all reviews are returned, the managing editor processes the manuscript and reviews for editor review and decision. The editor who was assigned the manuscript reads the peer reviews and makes a decision on the manuscript. For JCP, the potential outcomes are as follows: accept, resubmit, or reject. The managing editor then notifies author(s) of the decision. If the decision is to revise and resubmit, the authors are given four weeks to make revisions, and if the decision is to accept with revisions, which usually indicates more minor revisions, the authors have two weeks. Once a manuscript is resubmitted, it may be sent out for review again or it may be reviewed by an editor depending on the revisions requested. When a manuscript is accepted for publication, it then undergoes an initial copy editing and reference checking process by the editorial team. After authors make any final edits, the manuscript is sent to the journal’s production team with Taylor & Francis, who then work on typesetting the article for publication. The authors will receive proofs for final review from the production team. Once finalized, the article will be assigned to an upcoming issue for final publication.

As this summary illustrates, the editorial process for our journal relies on a small team of humans to move numerous manuscripts through a multi-step process. That means that at any point the process can get stuck or slowed down given the competing priorities for those involved (i.e. editors, reviewers, authors). While our many competing priorities or life circumstances may slow down the work at times, we have an established process that we think results in the publication of strong issues that contribute to the field. However, the biggest challenge of the work is that the foundation upon which we are established, the peer reviewed publishing industry, is shifting beneath us.

Keeping up with the changing landscape

As an incoming editor, you quickly realize that there is so much more to the peer reviewed publishing industry than you understood as an author. Both internal and external forces are at work that are shaping the industry into something new – AI, promotion and tenure expectations, plagiarism/copyright concerns, reliance on unpaid labor, open access, paper mills … Below we highlight just a few of these developments and challenges.

Publishing expectations

The expectations for academics to publish in peer reviewed venues are not new but these expectations are felt most keenly by specific groups such as pre-tenured faculty and faculty from countries around the world. Early career scholars face pressure to publish papers to continue to progress and make it to the next career stage. “If they can’t consistently get their papers in a good journal, they probably won’t get tenure, and they may not even have a career. And those journals are flooded with submissions. So, the competition is fierce – and it is global” (Dubner, 2024, 18:46). In fact, for some scholars around the world their educational programs or promotion process requires that they publish at least one work in journals with specific characteristics, such as a journal published in English. We only became aware of these types of requirements when a scholar sent us a pleading e-mail to reconsider their manuscript which we had rejected because they needed to have it published in an English journal to graduate. These situations are heartbreaking, but these expectations lead authors to submit to any journal that seems even remotely relevant, leading to more work for themselves and the editor teams as they are often desk rejected. With these high stakes and the often-slow peer-review publishing process, scholars have to be strategic about how, when, and where to get publications, which can take away from actually doing the research in an authentic and high-quality way. This push to “get published” seemingly overshadows the fundamental research which leads to the question of how much of the vast quantity of published academic research is only read by a handful of people and is only useful to the author (Smith, 2024) and their career.

More work, fewer resources

The common echo across academia is that there is increasingly more work to do and fewer resources to do it. Teaching is more time consuming, service responsibilities are growing, and certain research methodologies are more labor intensive than others. Couple that with the concerns about social injustice, climate change and world-wide trauma and you have an academic workforce that is under pressure. This pattern applies to the peer reviewed publishing enterprise as well and has serious implications for its continued success, particularly because it is built on service and unpaid labor. As one professor pointed out, “A lot of that work has traditionally been done for altruistic reasons” but now faculty are doing a better job of accounting for their labor and strategically weighing their workloads, which could lead to the collapse of systems built on volunteerism (Doležal, 2023, para. 17). For peer reviewed journals like JCP, this is true of both the peer reviewers and editors. As Nelson, a business professor, explained on a recent Freakanomics podcast episode (Dubner, 2024, 54:52): “Editors, largely, in my field are uncompensated for their job, and reviewers are almost purely uncompensated for their job. And so they’re all doing it for the love of the field. And those jobs are hard.”

Peer review is a critically important process for evaluating and verifying the quality and contributions of new work by experts in the field and provides an opportunity for feedback and revision to strengthen the work. As scholars, we have volunteered to do this unpaid work to see the latest research in our field and to give back since we would be submitting our own work which would require review by others. However, we are seeing a downtrend in researchers’ willingness to complete these time-consuming reviews which are unpaid and count minimally in promotion processes. Additionally, given the voluntary nature of the work, 39% of reviewers report never receiving training or having knowledge on how to conduct peer reviews of manuscripts (Petrescu & Krishen, 2002).

In the Freakanomics podcast (Dubner, 2024, 53:33), Ivan Oransky from Retraction Watch described the current state of peer review:

If you add up the number of papers published every year, and then you multiply that times the two or three peer reviewers who are typically supposed to review those papers — and sometimes they go through multiple rounds — it’s easily in the tens of millions of peer reviews as a unit. And if each of those takes anywhere from four hours to eight hours of your life as an expert, which you don’t really have because you’ve got to be teaching, you got to be doing your own research, you come up with a number that cannot possibly be met by qualified people. Really, it can’t. I mean, the math just doesn’t work. And none of them are paid. You are sort of expected to do this because somebody will peer review your paper at some other point, which sort of makes sense until you really pick it apart … So peer review, it’s become really peer-review light and maybe not even that at the vast majority of journals.

Similarly, Flaherty (2022, para. 2) states:

This issue isn’t new: academic publishing has long been a delicate system that operates—tenuously—on goodwill, in the form of comprehensive, unpaid article analyses from expert volunteers. But the pandemic has pushed this system to breaking, or close to it. With academics’ professional and personal lives disrupted in so many ways for years now, this kind of labor is increasingly harder to source: journal editors across fields say scholars are significantly less likely to accept article-review requests, if they respond at all, and (to a lesser degree but concerningly nonetheless) they are more likely to return reviews that are late or even rushed. At the same time, journals’ overall submission numbers haven’t decreased to the extent many anticipated during COVID-19, and they have actually increased in many fields.

The increasing workload, without additional support and sometimes with fewer resources, is also causing stress for editors, which is evidenced by the wave of editors resigning from their posts (Grove, 2023; Upton, 2023). The resignations suggest editors are not willing to continue to be a part of the exploitative practices of academic publishing and are demanding that publishing practices change to align with the norms and values of the community and their disciplines rather than profit-oriented business strategies (Grove, 2023). Resigning after a month-long strike, the editorial board of one journal criticized the high profit margin of publishers which they said was built on the growing amount of time the editors were spending on handling manuscripts and finding reviewers (Upton, 2023). The editors objected to the publisher converting the journal to open access, having to deal with an increase in papers, and the automatic referral of rejected manuscripts to other Wiley journals. At JCP, we have experienced some of these same challenges – increasing number of manuscripts to process (including large number that do not align with journal’s focus), high rate of reviewers declining, and changes to the level and structure of support from the publisher over the years.

Paper mills

Paper mills are a development that has resulted from the pressure to publish. Paper mills are businesses or brokerage sites that facilitate the publication of phony or poorly written manuscripts that resemble authentic research and/or sell authorship on actual manuscripts (Marcus, 2019). When the stakes of having publications is as high as described above, authors may find themselves desperate to find ways to get the publications that they need for career success. As described by Oransky in the Freakonomics podcast (Dubner, 2024, 20:15), “So if you think about the economics of this, it is worthwhile if you are a researcher to actually pay – in other words, it’s an investment in your own future – to pay to publish a certain paper. What I’m talking about is literally buying a paper or buying authorship on a paper.”

Our team first learned about this practice when our publisher contacted us and told us we needed to desk reject a manuscript we had just received because it was “from a known Russian paper mill.” The experience was eye opening for our team, and though we hoped it was a rare experience, we have since then received other manuscripts which we believe to also be from paper mills. One Russian site claims to have brokered authorships for more than 10,000 researchers (Marcus, 2019).

Concluding thoughts

So, what does this mean for all of us involved in the publishing process, authors, reviewers, and editors? For us at JCP, this has led to longer processing time for submitted manuscripts, higher percentage of desk rejections, increased workloads for the editorial team, authors who are unhappy with delays, and with our editorial team being frustrated with our inability to keep the process running smoothly and quickly. We recognize that this current state is not sustainable, and that change must occur. However, as Flaherty (2022, para. 43) states, “real solutions would require labor solidarity across academic tracks & ranks because everything else is a bandaid.” Real solutions would be to reduce exploitative workloads, have better incentives and rewards for peer review, ensure university acknowledgment of peer review service, particularly in promotion and tenure, hire more people, use more inclusive peer review recruitment strategies, rethink double-blind peer review, and provide editors and journals with more support (Allen et al., 2022; Flaherty, 2022). These massive changes to an entire industry are beyond the scope of our small editorial team, but we recognize that changes start with each of us, and so we are making a commitment to exploring solutions that we can control such as author education and awareness raising efforts, further developing the editorial board, sending more targeted and personalized reviewer invitations, and advocating for change in promotion and tenure standards. Ultimately academics are committed to asking and answering tough questions to advance science and knowledge. The peer review process is a fundamental part of ensuring the methods are sound, the findings are legitimate and well articulated and the impact worthy of a contribution to the literature. If, as Dubner (2024) noted, this depends on tens of millions of reviews it would seem the system and processes need further discussion. If not, rushed and inadequate reviews will only escalate and the important and meaningful service of journal editing will be harder and harder to secure.